You are here:

Is cannabis whisky on the way?

‘About once a month, a suspicious character, looking nervous, comes into our distillery with his hand under his coat,’ writes Darek Bell in his book, Alt Whiskeys. ‘We always think we are about to get robbed. Instead of a gun, he pulls out a mason jar of cannabis moonshine.’

As owner and co-founder of the Corsair distillery in Nashville, Tennessee, Bell has ‘distilled every grain possible, from blue corn to black rice and popcorn’, reckons Bill Owens, president of the American Distilling Institute. ‘And has then,’ he adds, ‘jumped over to distil all the beers he could get his hands on.’

Many of the recipes are featured in the book, though none would cut the mustard with the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA), even if distilled in Scotland – least of all the recipe on page 118 for cannabis whiskey (included purely for academic interest).